The Bible can seem like a big, thick, intimidating book. But when you consider that it’s the story of God creating and then redeeming everything, the Bible is astonishingly brief.

The same is true of the resurrection story. Luke gives us twelve verses. What’s more Luke doesn’t say what it means. If you want to know that, you have to read Luke’s sequel, the Book of Acts.

Why doesn’t Luke tell us what it means here? 

Because it means everything.

There’s no person, no thought, no fact, no action, nothing in creation that isn’t affected by it.

The late author Shusaku Endo was unique—a Japanese Catholic. He’s perhaps best known for his 1966 book, Silence, which became a movie by Martin Scorsese.

Endo was born into a culture which makes it very hard to become a Christian, but he was converted at the age of 11 under the influence of his mother and his aunt. In his 1979 book, The Life of Jesus, Endo said the disciples were ordinary men who didn’t have particularly strong convictions. “How did they manage to wake up, regain their faith, and then realize for the first time the true merit of Jesus?” 

Endo wrote, “That leads to another problem. There were all these new Christian communities established by disciples who previously had been such cowards. The fact remains that all these communities were one in accepting the resurrection of Jesus and in proclaiming Jesus Christ as Savior.

“If you don’t believe in the resurrection, you will be forced to believe that something else hit the disciples as every bit as amazing, maybe different, but of equal force in its electrifying intensity. 

“If you try to explain the changed lives of the early Christians, you will find yourself making leaps of faith as great as if you believed the resurrection to begin with.”

The early Christians did not change the entire world based on a metaphor they made up. They did it because they had a personal experience of the Risen Lord and wanted everyone, everywhere to have what they had.

The power that raised Jesus from the dead is loose in the world.

That means everything for how we live our lives.

Everything.